Council Pushes Ahead With Changes Despite Government’s ‘Plan-Stop’ Policy

Friday, 18 July 2025, 4:38 pm
Article: Kira Carrington - Local Democracy Reporter

Marlborough's council will charge ahead with changes aimed at airline safety, despite the Government pushing pause on plan amendments.

The district council's environment plan changes aim to ensure buildings or objects that could compromise aircraft safety could not be built close to Marlborough’s three airports.

Resource Management Act (RMA) reform minister Chris Bishop announced on Wednesday the Government wants to stop councils from passing amendments to environment and land use plans.

Councils should not be wasting resources on making changes to plans under the RMA, ahead of major reforms expected in 2027, he said.

“Even though councils know the RMA’s days are numbered, many are required to continue with time-consuming, expensive plan-making processes under the RMA,” Bishop said.

“The Government’s intention is that stopping plan requirements for councils will enable them to focus on critical work to prepare to transition to the new system.”

Councils would be required to withdraw any planned changes that had not progressed to hearings within 90 days of the RMA Amendment Bill coming into effect in early August.

The Marlborough District Council environment and planning committee unanimously voted to prepare a change to their Proposed Marlborough Environment Plan on Thursday, 24 hours after Bishop’s announcement.

Council strategic planner Clementine Rankin said the planned change would ensure buildings or objects that could compromise aircraft safety could not be built within the vicinity of Marlborough’s three airports.

“For safety purposes, it's critical to provide protection for air corridors used in approaches to, and departures from, our airports,” Rankin said.

“It is a civil aviation safety issue when structures like buildings or frost fans penetrate into [air corridors].”

Visual and structural objects that penetrated into an airport’s approach air space were already prohibited under Civil Aviation Authority rules.

But the council could not legally deny resource consents for people who wanted to build those objects without a change to the Proposed Marlborough Environment Plan.

Rankin said there were recently constructed frost fans that had become a safety risk.

“This issue has occurred due to the focus [in rural zoning] on noise only.

“The controlled activity rule does not include an airport protection standard.”

Rankin said that the council would move forward with the plan change, despite Bishop’s announcement, and would ask the Environment Minister for an exemption if they had to.

Only private plan changes, natural hazard changes, and changes directed by the minister were automatically exempt.

All other exemptions had to be requested from the minister within three months of the policy becoming law.

Councillor David Croad greeted the announcement with a shake of his head, calling it “disingenuous”.

“I don't often participate in politics, but yesterday's plan-stop thing, [saying] ‘we're stopping that because we want to save ratepayers' money’, it's a little bit disingenuous in my opinion,” Croad said.

“Ultimately it implies that the staff that we have in our planning departments are going to go home and go off payroll for a period of time.

“We have great people in this building and it takes a while to build good teams.

“We just don't get to turn these things on and off at will.”

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.

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